What is the Value of a Newspaper?

The Washington Post announced Monday afternoon that Jeff Bezos, the C.E.O. of Amazon.com, is buying the newspaper.

In October, 2011, the Boston Globe published an article on the dysfunction that had plagued the Boston Red Sox during their historic late-season collapse: among the memorable details, the paper wrote that star pitchers had taken to drinking beer and eating fried chicken in the clubhouse instead of cheering on their teammates from the dugout, and that the manager, Terry Francona, had been inattentive to players, perhaps owing to his recent divorce or his use of painkillers to recover from surgery.

The article relied mostly on unnamed sources, and the statements about Francona, who left the team after the season, were especially contentious. Rumors began circulating that the team’s top executives had anonymously smeared their former employee. Not so, argued the Red Sox’s principal owner, John Henry, who said on a radio talk show, “It’s reprehensible that it was written about in the first place.”

A few things have changed since 2011. The Red Sox are good again. And, as of the wee hours of Saturday morning, John Henry owns the Boston Globe.

Would a Henry-owned Globe have run that story about the Red Sox? Or else, how might that story have been different? These questions are, of course, proxies for other ones—not just about the paper’s sports coverage but about the working model in which a newspaper must manage its editorial objectives while under the ownership of a wealthy, powerful figure with many business interests. In Henry’s case, those interests include, in addition to the Red Sox, a large share in the New England Sports Network television station, a NASCAR racing team, and the storied Liverpool football club. (A spokesman for Henry didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Brian McGrory, the editor of the Globe, was quick to dismiss speculation about the potential conflict of interest in sports coverage: “We have no plans whatsoever to change our Red Sox coverage specifically, or our sports coverage in general, nor will we be asked.” (In an e-mail, McGrory declined further comment.) This situation is not entirely novel: the former owner of the Globe, the New York Times Company, also had a stake in the Red Sox for ten years, before selling in 2012. During that decade, articles about the team carried a disclaimer explaining the relationship, a practice likely to be resurrected under Henry’s direct ownership. Eileen Murphy, a spokesperson for the Times, said that the sale to Henry “is the result of a very full and active sales process,” and that the company felt that the decision was “in the best interest” of shareholders, the newspapers being sold, and the Boston community.

Still, some veterans of the sports section have voiced concern, including the current sports editor, Joe Sullivan, who told the Times that potential conflict would be “hanging in the air.” The Globe itself mentioned several potential areas of friction in its article on the sale, noting that Henry “had periodically chafed at the treatment of his team by local news media,” especially in regards to the Globe’s coverage in October, 2011. The Globe also noted Henry’s past forays into political advocacy, writing that he had supported John Kerry’s Presidential campaign in 2004. (Over the past few years, I have written several book reviews for the Globe and contributed to the paper’s Ideas section.)

Henry—a slim sixty-three-year-old in black, rectangular glasses—has the Steve Jobsian look of a modern self-made billionaire. The son of soybean farmers from Arkansas, he dropped out of college in California to tour with a couple of rock bands before being called back to the family farm after his father’s death. Later, he got into commodities trading and amassed a fortune that today is estimated at $1.5 billion.

In 1999, he bought the Florida Marlins baseball team. In 2002, he sold the Marlins to make a bid for the Red Sox. Under his ownership, the team won two World Series titles, in 2004 and 2007, but he mostly remained a quiet figure in the city. Then, in 2008, after he separated from his first wife, he became a minor object of fascination in the local gossip pages, lightly mocked as an unlikely playboy at night clubs. In 2009, when he married Linda Pizzuti, thirty years his junior, the reception was held at Fenway Park, and Maroon 5 played in the outfield.

Henry paid seventy million dollars for the Globe and a few associated properties, including the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. That’s compared to the $1.1 billion that the New York Times Company paid for the Globe back in 1993. Like many other American newspapers, the paper has about half the circulation that it enjoyed in 1993, and is still losing readers. The New England Media Group, which includes the Globe and the other properties that Henry is buying, had a revenue loss of seven per cent in the quarter that ended in June compared with the same quarter a year earlier.

So, why did Henry buy the Globe? Maybe he sees a way to return the Globe to profitability. There are, as Ken Doctor writes for the Nieman Journalism Lab, other examples of investors buying up local papers with plans to return them to long-term stability: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway now owns a few dozen papers, and Aaron Kushner, after making noise a few years ago about his interest in the Globe, has revamped the Orange County Register by investing heavily in both its print and digital platforms. Yet Doctor points out that the strategies used to turn around other local papers, including the addition of digital paywalls and subscriber-benefit programs, have already been tried at the Globe, with mixed results. Henry bought the newspaper at a staggeringly low price, but it remains to be seen if it was a good deal.

But let’s say, for a moment, that Henry is not especially worried that the Globe turn a profit. The Red Sox, the New England Sports Network, and Liverpool all make money. Perhaps there is other value in owning yet another beloved cultural institution. Henry hinted at this in a short statement over the weekend: “This is a thriving, dynamic region that needs a strong, sustainable Boston Globe playing an integral role in the community’s long-term future.” There are worse ways for Henry to spend his money, and there are worse ways for the paper to continue than under the ownership of a local benefactor with a respect for local news. The paper’s dedicated and comprehensive coverage of recent events—including the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, and the ongoing Whitey Bulger trial—have been resonant examples of the value of a truly local newspaper with a rich collective memory and a staff of journalists who understand the city on a street-by-street level. Having a local owner with a familiar name only reinforces its status as a Boston icon. The Red Sox connection strengthens that feeling—and anything is better than being owned by New Yorkers.

There is, however, another possibility, and it recalls Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu—or, to cite real-world examples, like Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, or Sam Zell, whose brief run as owner of the Tribune Company (which publishes the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times) ended in bankruptcy and general disgrace. If an optimistic reading of Henry’s purchase is that he believes in the need for strong local journalism, a pessimistic one would be that he sees great value in controlling the Globe as a high-profile space to further his personal and professional aims. There are several contemporary examples of wealthy investors buying troubled local newspapers and then steering them in the direction of their pet interests. In 2008, Fox News president Roger Ailes purchased the Putnam County News and Recorder, in upstate New York, and proceeded to give its pages a rightward editorial bent. (The paper is now run by his wife, Elizabeth.) Last year, in a piece for Harper’s, David Sirota reported about how the surprising comeback of the Denver Post came with a growing politicization of its news coverage under Dean Singleton, the founder of MediaNews Group, which owns several local papers across the country. Earlier this year, the Times reported that the Koch brothers, powerful libertarian activists, were interested in buying local papers from Florida to Chicago to Los Angeles.

These examples highlight the unsettling effects of the daily newspaper’s flagging profitability, but judged against the longer narrative of American newspapers, they may come to be seen merely as a return to the industry’s roots. The period of big profits and clear editorial independence of major American newspapers—the Ochs Sulzberger Times, the Meyer Graham Washington Post—and the newsroom neutrality that existed at smaller papers throughout the country may come to be seen as an aberration. American newspapers from the colonial period into the twentieth century were, in many ways, mostly delivery devices for political opinion: whether it was newspapers that acted as agitators for independence during the Revolution, or those that served mainly as mere organs of political parties in the first half of the nineteenth century, or the dedicated progressivism of Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune in the middle of the nineteenth century, or the massive and politically influential papers run by Hearst and Pulitzer into the twentieth. A clear political bent continues at newspapers to this day, notably in editorial coverage, but most readers have come to expect objectivity from the news division of their local paper. Again, this is not necessarily the historical norm, nor is it taken as an irrefutable fact by contemporary readers, many of whom report suspicions of political bias in all the news they read.

Still, a return to blatantly politicized news from front to back, and an upending of the cultural expectation of and support for neutral reporting, would represent one of the most distressing outcomes of the decline of the newspaper business. John Henry doesn’t seem to be the kind of dedicated political player who would use his paper’s news division to effect policy change or to support certain politicians. But his intentions as a businessman are less clear. One hopes that the sale helps offer stability for the paper after several years of uncertainty. In the meantime, many will be reading the paper with a keener eye, especially if, as summer turns to fall, the Red Sox begin to slip in the standings.

Photograph by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty.

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